USA TODAY International Edition
Hairstyle discrimination is getting another look
Laws are catching up to a persistent cultural bias
Clinton Stanley Jr. was excited about his first day at a new private school in suburban Orlando, Florida.
His father, Clinton Sr., thought A Books Christian Academy, with its small class sizes and rigorous curriculum, was the perfect fit for his 6- year- old.
But the child never made it inside his first grade classroom. The father and son arrived only to have an administrator stop them at the entrance and demand the boy leave to cut his hair. The administrator cited a school policy banning dreadlocks.
The rejection confused the outgoing boy, who had been raised to express himself and asked for locks when he was 4 years old so he could be like his godfather, an NFL player.
“It still bothers me,” Stanley says, his voice shaking with sadness. “It was a hurtful experience.”
Black people young, old and in between have been rejected from jobs, schools and other public places because of the texture and style of their hair. But that’s changing. Several states and cities this year have passed or proposed laws banning policies that penalize people of color for wearing natural curls, dreadlocks, twists,
braids and other hairstyles that embrace their cultural identity.
California and New York were the first states to enact laws this summer forbidding race- based hair discrimination. New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Kentucky as well as Cincinnati and Montgomery County, Maryland, have followed with proposed legislation.
Many black women say they’ve felt pressured for decades to use excessive heat, chemical relaxers and weaves to conform to European standards of straight hair. That often means spending hundreds of dollars a month – and countless hours – at hair salons. According to Nielsen, black consumers spent $ 473 million on hair care in 2017.
Much of the pressure, black women say, has come from employers and school officials who don’t view locks or braids as the professional hairstyle they require, or might see the looks as a political or aggressive statement, or signal the wearer isn’t interested in “fitting in.”
“This is not just about hair. It’s about acknowledgement of personal rights, it’s about checking bias,” says California State Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Democrat who wears locks and proposed the state law named Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, or CROWN. “Our hair has always been a source of either pride or embarrassment, a sense of power or a sense of unequalness.”
Black women and ‘ self- editing’
Hair bias often stems from stereotypes that black hair in its natural state is dirty or unkempt, says Patricia Okonta, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. While there isn’t a consensus among federal courts about whether racial stereotypes violate Title VII, the federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination based on race, sex and religion, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has argued that natural hair and styles should be covered by that statute.
Banning ethnic hairstyles “upholds this notion of white supremacy,” Okonta says.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights was at the forefront of the legal movement when it released new guidance in February specifying that penalizing black people for how they wear their hair was as much a form of bias as refusing to hire people because of their ethnicity or religion.
At the time, the commission was investigating seven complaints of hair bias. Several high- profile incidents have prompted lawsuits.
In September, New York City settled with a Sally Hershberger salon accused of several incidents of hair bias. The business settled out of court and agreed to pay a $ 70,000 civil penalty to the city. It also agreed to start training staff members about diversity and styling of black hair.
The NAACP legal defense fund has taken on several cases, including one on behalf of two Boston- area sisters, Mya and Deanna Cook, who were forbidden to wear braid extensions to Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in 2017. The policy has since been rescinded.
It also represented Chastity Jones, an Alabama woman who had a customer service job offer rescinded because she refused to cut her locks. Jones appealed her case up to the U. S. Supreme Court, which declined to review it.
In addition, the organization and the American Civil Liberties Union are suing the Florida Department of Education on behalf of the Stanley family. They are arguing A Book’s Christian Academy’s dreadlocks ban violates nondiscrimination requirements in the Civil Rights Act. The complaint says the school must follow the law because it accepts state scholarship students.
The growing wave of local and state legislation has forced many nonblack managers and executives to recognize hair bias exists. Businesses that offer diversity training to employers, such as Fisher Phillips, a law firm with several offices in California, are updating their guidance to pay attention to hair.
“It’s taken time for white people to recognize that African Americans have to self- edit in a way that is, in addition to and on top of, the ways that all of us have to self- edit to keep our jobs,” says Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law and distinguished professor of law at U. C. Hastings.
“I mean if a white girl shaves off half her ( hair) and dyes the other half pink, she may very well have a problem, but nobody will make a peep if she does much of anything else. African American women should have the same amount of freedom.”
The Society for Human Resource Management says HR professionals regularly call its advisory hotline with employee appearance questions. In its employer toolkit, the organization says that while employees can be required to have neatly groomed hair, differences in hair texture must be respected and natural hairstyles such as afros can’t be declared unacceptable.
OneUnited, the largest black- owned bank in the USA, always has accepted whatever hairstyles its employees choose to wear, says Teri Williams, its president and chief operations officer.
“We ask people to bring their authentic selves into our work environment,” Williams says.
When a manager tells a black employee to avoid braids, it’s “typically ... an attempt to give guidance and coaching and not an attempt to be mean,” says Pam Jeffords, diversity and inclusion practice leader for the consultancy PwC. Managers, she adds, often explain that they give such advice because a braided hairstyle could be an obstacle to promotion. “Regardless, it’s still wrong.”
Such guidance can inflict psychological harm, says Gillian Scott- Ward, a psychologist in New York who directed the hair and racial identity documentary “Back to Natural.” She says people of color often feel rejected by society when they can’t wear ethnic hairstyles, and many black girls are taught at a young age they must straighten their naturally kinky hair to be beautiful.
“Black people have had to hide what our real natural hair looks like … for so long,” Scott- Ward says. “We are introducing who we really are to the world, and I think that’s a shift.”
‘ Authentically me’
Will Jawando, a Montgomery County, Maryland, council member who introduced the county’s natural- hair bill, says he was motivated in part by his 5- year- old daughter asking why she couldn’t have long hair like girls she saw on television and at school.
His daughter, who wears her hair natural like her two sisters, thought long hair would make her prettier, Jawando says.
“It really hit me like a ton of bricks,” Jawando says. His daughter, because of centuries of “eurocentric” beauty standards, “still thinks the way her hair naturally grows isn’t as pretty as someone else’s.”
College- age students also are struggling with natural hair acceptance as they move from liberal college campuses to corporate America.
Brittanie Rice, a junior at Spelman College in Atlanta, says she went natural her freshman year. Still, when she goes to internship interviews and networking events, Rice says she wears her hair in a bun rather than in her preferred twists.
“I know how some companies are, so what I’d rather do is just go ahead and do the slicked- back bun or ponytail to get my foot in the door,” says Rice, who secured an internship at Boeing for next summer. Afterward, she says, she can be “authentically me.’’
Catherine Williams, a senior at Georgia State University, sometimes wears her natural hair in a curly ponytail for her job at an Atlanta restaurant. Customers, she says, will stare at it.
“I’m not trying to get attention. This is how my hair grows out of my head,” Williams says. “I don’t think there’s anything unpolished about having dreads, or having a fro ... as long as you’re taking care of your hair, which most people do.”
“This is not just about hair. It’s about acknowledgement of personal rights.” Holly Mitchell California state senator